perfections. Gossip is gossip, whether it be about the private woes of a family up the street or the fall of a foreign dynasty. I have known a very worthy man who, meaning well, forbade his children at the dinner-table talk of any one within the parish; thus he designed to restrain all tittle-tattle, and induce a lofty spirit of discourse. They conversed only of such things as the Roman occupation and the likelihood of life in other planets, and made a fortune later on by printing newspapers. But "gossip on trivial things!" you may say with reprobation, thinking of tongues that wag in malice, envy, innuendo; the mole-hill on the coast was a seeming trifle, but it killed a Prince, and plainly you mean scandal when I mean the gush of clean hill-water from the village pump. other thing than gossip-apart from the catholic heart, the indiscriminate cordiality of Captain Cutlass-kept us all, in Schawfield, from Fancy Farm to the fiddler's garret, in a blithe relationship that helped to make the darkest, dreichest winter more than tolerable.

No

We laughed at the Shakespearean frolic of the Captain, but we loved him none the less. It was a more amusing ploy than the sight of him trotting the country seeking a half-made wife. Tam Dunn, the first thing in the morning, got a fine new hat, and his old one passed to Watty Fraser, who had crushed his own at a wedding where a wag had slipped it on the floor below the foot with which poor Watty always beat the time to his own performances of frantic reels. Orpheus, who got the story with the hat, blabbed to the lady of the inn-"In the name of fortune! did one ever hear the like!" quo' she astounded, and straight to the lasses in her kitchen to give the latest news with an accompaniment of excited clicks from her pebbled ears. But they had heard it already from Tam Dunn, LIVING AGE. VOL. LII. 2706

who was ever after to be known as Christopher. The story, as it spread, swept into its current wonderful new grotesque particulars-the Captain had lost a second lady on the road; he had forced the survivor, willy-nilly, to the hospitality of Fancy Farm, and thrust her in on an unexpectant and astounded Aunt Amelia; it was as like as not he had even found the ideal woman at last and meant to marry her! But of the truth itself, and the bold adventure of Penelope on the box, the night maintained a loyal privacy.

Grace Skene's lady Abigail, quite unconscious of her part in an adventure that amused the whole community, rose next morning early, and, with nothing else to do in the absence of her mistress, explored the neighborhood. She sauntered past the lodge, and with a brisker step passed through the village street, the icicles of whose eaves were dripping from the warmth of breakfast fires and a change of weather. Had she been preceded by the bellman or a file of halberdiers she could no more immediately have been decerned as the lady who had figured in Sir Andrew's escapade. James Birrell's sister saw her from her window; cried her brother hurriedly ben from his newspaper; he was pleased to say the stranger had a stylish mannerStyle, for him, depending on the dress and a certain nonchalance of carriage. For nonchalance it were hard to beat Penelope Colquhoun; she had the pavement walk of cities, and that air of imperturbability that depends so often on level and indifferent eyes.

"A home-trimmed hat!" was the more searching comment of Miss 'Tilda. "I wouldna wonder if she's another of Norah's actress-bodies."

Actress or no actress, Mr. Birrell insisted on the Style, and even saw a likeness to Miss Norah; "Tilda was unreasonably annoyed at the comparison; Norah never walked as if the street

were of no account to her, and, had always an eye for the windows. "That one," "Tilda declared, "is fidging to look at things, but knows that we may be watching her."

"All the more to her credit," said Mr. Birrell; "if she showed an interest in the shops you would be the very one to doubt if she was a perfect lady."

"A perfect lady," said his sister, "does exactly what she likes, even if it's perfectly ridiculous, and she

doesn't bother her head what folk are thinking; that one's studying herself and making an impression. You never saw a lady with furs on out on the street at this hour in the morning" -a conclusion which sent Mr. Birrell away to his office chuckling, but wondering, too, why 'Tilda, not ungenerous in her nature usually, should on this occasion be so critical.

And Miss Tilda, as it happened, was mistaken, as women often are who are foolishly encouraged to believe their hasty intuitions have divine authority, while in truth they are less to be depended on than the masculine findings of pedestrian reason, for Penelope was actually as abstracted as she looked. If one had asked her suddenly for her thoughts she might with honesty have said Free Will, for on that fascinating futile problem was her mind engaged when it was not puzzling over-the loss of an umbrella! The mind undisciplined to concentration is more of an ass in our apparently profound abstractions than when we are on the surface, and Penelope's was grotesquely philandering with metaphysics, umbrellas, and a mental portrait of Tam Dunn!

The veritable post-boy at that very moment when she had come to the end of the street and turned on her heel to retrace her steps was himself bewildered. He had found the umbrella in his carriage when he set about its cleaning in the morning; the ownership was obvious, and, not unmindful of the

pantry ale, he went up with it himself to Fancy Farm.

"There ye are!" was the housekeeper's greeting; "I suppose ye would be nane the waur o' a hoop on your head this mornin'," and he sheepishly grinned when she charged him with a carelessness of which, if she only knew it, he was noway guilty. He could have acquitted himself in a sentence of the major charge of conduct unbecoming to a post-boy in leaving Miss Colquhoun to dispose as she might of her summarily ejected baggage, but he knew very well it would not relieve him of the blame of taking even an involuntary part in Sir Andrew's frolic, and if the housekeeper was ignorant yet of that escapade, this, it was plain, was not the moment nor he the man to enlighten her.

"Tak' my advice, Tam Dunn," said she, "and leave the drink alane! Or if that's no' possible, never touch it till your day's work's done. Ye must have had a royal time at the curlin' yesterday."

He had earned a hat, but plainly it was at some cost to his reputation! "Ye canna drink very deep and mak' much o' a shape at a curlin' rink," he protested. "I never was soberer in my life than yesterday; Sir Andrew himsel' could tell ye, if ye asked him, and I beat him."

"Don't tell me!" commanded Mrs. Powrie; "if ye werena under the influence ye wouldna hae been so free wi' Miss Colquhoun-and her a minister's daughter!"

He stared at her, amazed; what had Captain Cutlass done with his reputation?

"You and your predestination," continued the contemptuous housekeeper. "What's the reason annexed to the Fifth Commandment?" and Tam Dunn scratched his head for a response that had once been there.

"Ye, can ask that!" he replied hope

lessly.

"I'm hanged if I can mind." "And you're the clever man that's supposed to be up in the Shorter Catechism!" said Mrs. Powrie. "Next time ye drive onybody to Fancy Farm see and confine your attention to your horses-they'll understand ye better;" and with that flea in his lug he returned to his stable-yard, unrelieved, by so little as a horn of ale, of the dejection which had come with the change of weather.

For thaw was on, and this, for certain, was the last of the winter's curling. A bland moist wind came blowing from the west; the snow was sliding thunderously from the village roofs; the gutters ran like burns, all snow-bree-flushed; a tinkler clan, with their brown rags dank as if they had been freed that moment from the burial of a wreath, oozed into the village, spreading themselves in quest of alms. The woods gave up a ghost of frosta silvery exhalation; the arches dripped, the roads melted into yellow mire.

In a warmly sheltered glade of a planting on the braes above the unplayable loch, Sir Andrew, with his coat off, wielded an axe on fallen timber with his wood-cutters. The deepgashed trunks and the yellow spales smelled acrid sweet and elemental, drenched with the juice of years. He watched the saw slice to the heart of a mighty spruce, the head of the monarch shake petulant for a moment, then the fall. Far through the wood went the sound of the falling; the world shook at the impact. It was, to Captain Cutlass, like a murder. No more the sweetness of the rising sap, the joy of weather, dark night and dawn on the topmost boughs, the brave companionship of a hundred years! The heart of him rose in his throat, and he felt in his eyes the sting of tears.

He threw down his axe and on with his coat impatiently. "Three hundred

cubic feet at the mill," he exclaimed, "and there's money in it, but it seems a shame! I would rather, like my grandfather, be at the plantin'."

The foresters were well enough acquainted with that capricious soul to comprehend its sentiment. "I'm never much vexed for firs," said one of them. "They're no' like oaks or beeches, wi' a hearty grip o' the grund, Sir Andrew-they're kind o' like the pauper bairns in the town doon-bye, nae richt roots in the place they grow in. A flaff o' wind and they may gang; but grand for buildin'! grand for buildin'!"

"That was seemin'ly Virgil's notion, too, but someway I see in them other qualities. If they hae but a short grip o' the ground, as ye say, they've had it longer than any other tree in Scotland or in the world. I never see yon clump on the knowe behind the house but it mak's me think o' the time when there wasna a leaf in Europe, and unco beasts went rootin' among the fir-tree needles. Cut no farther than the fence there; I'll give those fellows on the other side another lease -for they're an ancient people," and off he set for luncheon.

To

Miss Skene had not arrived when he left the house; she was, it seemed, unused to emerge from her bedroom till the day was aired: this knowledge had come to him, not directly from Penelope, whom as yet he had not seen since he left her standing among her baggage, but had filtered through the housekeeper and his Aunt Amelia. think that Captain Cutlass might blame himself less for his deception of a woman not in Amelia's category of "lady" than if his victim had been Miss Skene herself, would be grievously to misapprehend his character; what amusement he had found in the discovery of her identity had been at himself and his dinner-jacket: he ruefully looked on his escapade now as

less defensible than ever, and was honestly afraid to meet the girl to whom, sooner or later, he was due an explanation.

The imminence of this was in his mind when walking along the slushy river-side in a drizzle of rain he heard a shriek beyond a distant alder thicket. Immediately he guessed at some disaster at the pool between the weirs, where, in spite of his warnings, Norah sometimes skated. At least a thousand yards were between him and the pool; it flashed upon him as he ran how death strides into the house of life in a single breath, and he realized the horror of her drowning. It was as his fears had told him,-she struggled feebly on the edge of the broken ice, but her cries had brought assistance; she rescued before he reached her side, and stood a drooping. pathetic figure, whimpering.

was

"I have told you often-" he be gan impetuously, taking her in his arms, where she clung to him speechless for a moment, while Penelope, her rescuer, no less drenched than herself, sat wincing at her feet.

"It was to be the last time, and only for a little," said his cousin penitently, "and it-and it nearly was the last time. If Miss Colquhoun had not ran down from the garden when she heard me" she glanced with fervent gratitude at Penelope who, as pale as herself but without her tears, now stared with surprise at Captain Cutlass.

He took off his cap to her, wondering why she should sit on the sodden bank. "Thank God, you're a good runner, Miss Colquhoun!" he remarked, bending to loosen his cousin's skates. "Why! it was-it was you who drove

have discovered sooner. I had hoped

to have a more favorable opportunity to explain and offer my apologies. Last night's exploit was the outcome of a wager, and I had no idea at the time you were to be our guest."

"It was-it was very silly!" cried Penelope, biting her under lip with the spitfire in her pallid aspect.

"Quite!" he agreed. "There was really no excuse for it, but I warned you of my reputation."

"It was cruel," she insisted, at no pains to conceal her displeasure.

"As it happened, yes," he admitted. "I hope you'll tell me yet that you forgive me," and he made to help her to her feet.

She tried to rise, rejecting his assistance, and sat down suddenly again with a baffled exclamation.

"It's-it's nothing serious," she remarked, with a grimace of pain that belied the statement. "I think I have hurt my foot."

They helped her home between them. her plight diminishing the emotion which the more alarming accident to Norah had aroused. The Doctor, summoned from the village, reported a broken ankle.

In the midst of the commotion caused by these alarms in the ordinarily uneventful life of Fancy Farm, Grace Skene's appearance on the scene was less dramatic than Amelia had expected, or herself perhaps had planned. She drove up. at noon, to a house where Penelope was a heroine, and Norah Grant and her cousin were preposterously preoccupied with a sense of gratitude. Warmth was not wanting in her welcome, it was true, but she had, too obviously, no monopoly of the household interest. and her beauty and her frocks, that seldom failed her elsewhere, seemed painfully less important than a common fractured ankle. It was the hour (had she been of a happier disposition) for displaying

was her brains, and as needful to her (as it seemed) as her very hands; Penelope was inconsiderate to have met with such an accident, and the prospect of weeks without her services seemed an outrage. The chirruping sympathy of Miss Amelia failed to comfort the lady, and the audacious impenitence of the patient, snugly ensconced in the care of Mrs. Powrie, was exasperating.

Worst of all was the attitude of Sir Andrew Schaw. Oblivious of her physical perfections, he was looking for vulgar sentiment, and when he did not find it, plainly showed his disappointment. For all his tolerance of the weaklings of the world, who were so from a helpless ignorance, heredity, or the circumstances of their daily lives, and despite his own philosophy that denied him the right to blame, he would sometimes go to the heart of things with a word of bitter condemnation for that sin he esteemed the worst of all the lack of human kindliness in those to whom the world was more than kind.

Two or three days of brushing her own hair in this distracting atmosphere was enough for Grace; she took her leave at the end of the week in a temper, abandoning Penelope to the care of a household which appeared to think that care a privilege.

CHAPTER XII.

Norah lost no time in lamentations for her old companion's going; she had found a new delight in life. She packed the unwilling Mrs. Powrie off about her proper business, and herself assumed the rôle of nurse to a patient singularly docile, nonchalant to the last degree, void of sophistication,

merry as a cricket, proud at times as Lucifer, shrewd and sensible in many ways, in others simple almost to absurdity. Penelope appeared to have read no more than a score or so of booksreal books; she knew herself the others were of no account but only for amusement. But she had read those twenty thoroughly; and her knowledge of their spirit, with her native wit, her nonconformity, her fearlessness and confidence, gave to her conversation a curious piquant quality, audacious and original. To come from a manse, it was odd to find her lacking reverence -not for the fundamental things, the ancient altars and the sacrifices, but for the very shibboleths and usages that always meant so little to Sir Andrew Schaw. In her, as in him, was the sense of caste awanting: she would not have a different tone or manner for Tam Dunn and for the baronet; to either she would blurt what came to her head, spontaneously, without conformity or conciliation. It might have been intolerable to Miss Amelia, but to Norah it was charming! Even to Norah, who had learned to like the voice of unreserved simplicity from the practice of her cousin, Penelope's rash deliverances on any subject that came up for conversation might have been ridiculous had they not so often evidence of thoughts peculiar, individual, creditable; guesses at truth that never wanted a kind of dignity since they were inspired by the delicious naïveté of a clever child and lit by unusual insight. Penelope, indeed, at times confounded her, exposing the fallacy of an attitude in a simple question, stripping a cherished theory to the buff and showing it had knock-knees. That a certain principle should be generally accepted in the realms of art or social conduct was enough to make it questionable to Penelope Colquhoun; she did not dogmatize, but she always kept the right to doubt.